Helping Hands

A community rallies around three design firms to help create a healing wonderland for children in Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital.

By AnnMarie Martin

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The six-story Main Street is a naturally lit public thoroughfare that links together all elements of the hospital and provides expansive views of Royal Park.
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The Royal Children’s Hospital is located within Royal Park, adjacent to the site of the former children’s hospital. It’s been independently assessed to achieve a 5-star rating from the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star Healthcare pilot assessment tool.
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“Creature,” a sculpture by Melbourne artist Alexander Knox, sits under the “Sky Garden,” a mobile sculpture by Jade Oakley. The delicately floating leaves allude to the parkland setting
and are meant to exemplify the free-spirited nature of children.
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The Melbourne Aquarium helped to construct a two-story aquarium, which extends from the ground level
opposite the main entry into the two emergency waiting areas. Graphics and furnishings surrounding the tank help to form a cohesive color scheme and design statement.
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The Melbourne Aquarium helped to construct a two-story aquarium, which extends from the ground level
opposite the main entry into the two emergency waiting areas. Graphics and furnishings surrounding the tank help to form a cohesive color scheme and design statement.
View larger

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The Melbourne Aquarium helped to construct a two-story aquarium, which extends from the ground level
opposite the main entry into the two emergency waiting areas. Graphics and furnishings surrounding the tank help to form a cohesive color scheme and design statement.
View larger

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Eighty percent of patient rooms and all-day
medical chairs provide views of the surrounding park, creating a calming effect for children and their families.
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Eighty percent of patient rooms and all-day
medical chairs provide views of the surrounding park, creating a calming effect for children and their families.
View larger

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The design team worked with the Melbourne Zoo to build a meerkat enclosure. This creates visual excitement and distraction for the patients. It’s helped to make the hospital not just a healthcare facility but a destination for the general public, as well.
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Color schemes throughout the public spaces and also in patient and treatment rooms are meant to appeal not just young children, but the older patients and their families, as well as the hospital staff.
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It takes a village.

That’s the mantra international architecture and design firm HKS lives by when approaching any children’s hospital project. It’s also what they taught Australian firms Billard Leece Partnership (BLP) and Bates Smart Architects as they worked as international advisors on the Royal Children’s Hospital, located in Melbourne, Australia and completed in November of 2011.

“We served as guides, if you will,” says Ron Dennis, principal and senior vice president, as well as director of children’s health facilities design with HKS. Neither BLP nor Bates Smart had much experience designing children’s hospitals, so Dennis spent a significant amount of time working with the firms, reviewing possible design strategies.

“I talked to them about how you engage the community—can you get the zoo involved, can you get the women’s clubs, the auxiliaries,” Dennis explains. They also discussed wayfinding options, the use of gardens and other space utilization techniques. Then BLP and Bates Smart took those ideas and ran with them.

“The actual implementation of the interiors was developed out of the local architects, so what they’ve done in the inside of the facility and on the outside of the facility is an Australian response to what a children’s hospital needs to be,” Dennis says.

Thanks to both the Melbourne Zoo and the Melbourne Aquarium, nature’s influence played a major part in the hospital’s design. An impactful, mesmerizing two-story aquarium—notable for its sheer size and the rich color it brings to the project—extends from ground level opposite the main entry into the two emergency waiting areas. Staff from the aquarium assisted in the construction of the tank and have committed to its maintenance. A meerkat enclosure, similarly managed by the Melbourne Zoo, is situated in the busy outpatients’ waiting space on the ground floor and provides even more visual excitement for the patients.

“There were a number of groups that were able to be engaged,” Dennis says. “That brought a dimension that goes beyond a traditional hospital, and beyond a traditional children’s hospital. While we’ve done these kinds of things here, we’ve never had an opportunity to actually build a hospital in a park setting like that. And we’ve never had one that’s had such a direct relationship with the zoo.”

Located in Royal Park, adjacent to the site of Melbourne’s original children’s
hospital, Royal Children’s was “independently assessed” to achieve a 5-star rating, based on the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star Healthcare pilot assessment tool, according to Mark Healey, associate director at Bates Smart.

“Royal Children’s employed a sophisticated, pioneering approach to establish an integrated blending of low- and high-tech appropriate technologies in response to the Victorian Government’s targets to reduce energy, carbon dioxide emissions and potable water use. The project brief set incredibly high sustainability criteria—levels never achieved by a healthcare project in Australia,” he says.

The design team delivered on a number of sustainable initiatives, including grouping clinical areas that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week separately from those that only operate during
core hours in order to reduce energy consumption. Thirty-four percent of the total floor area is within five meters of perimeter windows, optimizing natural daylight. And perhaps most importantly, 80 percent of bedrooms and all-day medical chairs overlook Royal Park.

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